Interaction of high speed flow features with flames

What?

A research effort is underway to investigate the fundamentals of the interactions between shock waves and high speed vortices with flames, with the eventual applied goal of optimising a system that could be used to regain control over a remote wildfire before it can threaten people, infrastructure, and large swathes of wilderness regions.

The technique of using blast waves from high explosives to knock out a fire isn't new - the oil and gas industry have been doing it for almost a century, and Russian researchers several decades ago proposed a similar approach for wildfires. What's been missing has been a detailed, thorough understanding of the physics involved - without that, it becomes difficult to determine what would make for an effective scenario for a fire raging in the forest canopy.

including Dr. Michael Hargather, to undertake experiments that are leading to the first proper visualisation of the events. Numerical work accompanying this program is building up in complexity to offer additional insight into the problem.

One (two?) of the most frequently asked questions is "isn't that dangerous, and won't you kill all the koalas and birds?", to which the answer would be i) yes there are clear hazards, which is why we need to fully understand the flowfields and their effects in order to think about how this could be deployed as a controlled, effective technique (i.e. do not try this at home!), and ii) burning to death is not fun for any animal - millions of native fauna perished in the Victorian Black Saturday fires alone, with extinction-potential fire events not uncommon in various parts of the world now given some species are barely hanging on in tiny pockets of their remaining habitat. We'd like to have a role to play in preventing that happening.

How?

In the most basic sense, it's a really over-kill way of blowing out a big candle. The blast, be it with an explosion or with compressed air, creates a fast moving shock wave that's trailed by more high-speed flow - this high speed flow effectively pushes the fire off the fuel source if it's at close range... once the flame can't access fuel, combustion stops almost instantly. If the flame is further away, the supersonic shock wave has more of a role to play, introducing small-scale disturbances in the flame structures which grow and destabilise the flames. If the flame is offset to the side of the tube from which the blast is coming, then large vortices interact with the flame - their rotational energy introduces a lot of turbulence and disruption and the flame spins itself to death. These effects are quite different at lab scale vs. field scale, so it's important to get a much better understanding of the relationships between the variables involved.